Young Girl Collects 1,000 Barbies to Donate for Homeless

As a young girl, playing with Barbies was the go-to game. Collecting the fancy Barbies was a whole new league. Whenever you got a brand new Barbie, you instantly gained bragging rights and probably boasted to all of your friends.

At least that’s what the typical young girl would do, but when Gianni Graham from Norfolk, Virginia, was gifted two brand new Barbies for Christmas, she took a different approach than any other nine-year-old girl would take.

Instead of proudly taking her new Barbie dolls under her wing and playing with them for herself, Graham decided to reflect on the fact that it wasn’t fair for her to have new toys, while there were less fortunate people out there in the world who didn’t get that opportunity.

This seeded a brilliant idea in Graham’s mind.

Graham decided to donate her Christmas gift to the less fortunate girls her age, telling WTKR “I feel like girls in shelters should have the same as girls not in shelters”.

According to Gianna’s mother, Whitney Graham, her daughter decided to make this donation—which was the first of many—a few days after Christmas while playing with the Barbies herself.

To Gianna Graham, a Barbie isn’t only a toy, but instead, “The Barbie can be a friend to the young girls when they feel that they have no one to talk to.”

For this reason, Graham sought out a way to give several less fortunate girls the gift of a Barbie.

Shortly after Graham decided to donate her own two Barbies, she came up with a New Year’s resolution that serves as an inspiration to all of us. Graham decided it would be a brilliant idea to donate 1,000 Barbies to 1,000 little girls, so she set off to achieve her goal.

Graham doesn’t mess around with her goals. She created an Instagram page, “1kBarbiesfor1kgirls” in order for her goal to become public.

Originally, Graham thought it would take two months in order to collect one thousand Barbies, but she was pleasantly surprised at the results she was getting—in only two weeks, Graham went from five Barbie dolls to five-hundred.

People around the entire country had caught on to what Graham was doing, and they decided to add a helping hand by donating Barbies. One shipment that came all the way from Pasadena, California, to Graham’s hometown included a letter of encouragement, reading, “What an amazing project you are undertaking, good luck”.

According to the Huffington Post, shipments like this have been coming daily to Graham’s home.

Graham’s goal went more viral than expected, and when Ashton Kutcher posted on his Facebook page that Gianni Graham was doing this, Graham responded, “I didn’t even know it was gonna get that far. I didn’t even know he was gonna see it. I’m like, ‘How.'”

Gianni Graham is even serving as an inspiration to her little sister who says, “This is what my sister is doing, and I want to do it too.”

Graham’s goal is in the works of being accomplished, and when she finally does reach her goal of 1,000 Barbies, Graham plans on personally delivering the gifts to the homeless shelters and mailing them to a list of foster girls.

In addition to their gift, the girls that Graham intends on sending the Barbies to will also have another surprise. Graham is planning on writing a personalized letter to accompany each Barbie that will be sent.